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you've ever suffered through a divorce or similar major breakup, you
know that everything else in the world plays second fiddle to your
pain. As far as you're concerned, it's the only news that matters.Now imagine being Jennifer Aniston, and as you look from newspapers to magazines to TV shows, your divorce from husband Brad Pitt apparently really is the only news that matters. As the Iraq War quagmire continued, as governments toppled and South Asia struggled to recover from the tsunami disaster, the CNN crawl kept us posted with breaking news from the Aniston-Pitt front: Pitt's co-star Angelina Jolie denying an affair, cozy pictures of "Brangelina" in Africa and later on-location in Calgary, Pitt and Aniston filing for divorce/selling their L.A. mansion/dividing their production company assets. |
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when Jennifer was ready for a cathartic flood of tears, she did it in
the pages of Vanity Fair -- in a cover story that sold an
all-time record 650,000 copies of the magazine, and gave us the
now-famous quote "Am I lonely? Yes. Am I upset? Yes. Am I
confused? Yes. Do I have my days when I've thrown a little pity party
for myself? Absolutely. But I'm also doing really well." Weeks after that, she upgraded her condition to orange alert, appearing on Oprah to announce that, in the stages of mourning, she had finally reached past anger, rejection, denial, depression, etc. to reach acceptance. "I'm doing so well," Aniston said to the applauding studio audience. "Look at what's happening in other place in the world and look at what we have." And as if to write her own public punctuation on her troubles, she exhorted the viewing audience "C'mon people, turn a page!"
As the scandal hit, Aniston was wrapping up Derailed, a Miramax psychological drama shot in the U.K. by Swedish director Michael Hafstrom. Hafstrom characterized the film as "a Hitchcockian thriller about a married man who meets a married woman and they start a relationship and everything goes downhill from that." In Derailed, Aniston plays Lucinda, the unhappily married woman who meets Charles (Clive Owen), her equally disillusioned paramour on a commuter train to Chicago. It seems like a perfectly workable tryst, until their fling turns dangerous when a violent criminal (Vincent Cassel) blackmails them, promising to reveal the affair to their spouses if Charles and Lucinda don't pay him. "It will be one of those movies you leave and say 'the affair thing? Maybe not�' said Aniston. comparing the movie to Fatal Attraction in its consequence-heavy depiction of adultery. The film also marked a turning point in Aniston's treatment by the papparazzi and tabloid press. Now a woman wronged (and available) she would reflexively be romantically linked with her leading men, starting with Cassel. Later, when she filmed the ironically-titled The Break Up with Vince Vaughn, she was also reported to be seeing him too. In both cases, all involved denied it.  "I got to know her, but I had nothing to do with it. I like 'em a little thicker," joked Xzibit (TV's Pimp My Ride) who, with fellow rapper RZA played baddies in Derailed. Vaughn even gave a pre-emptive quote at a party celebrating the premiere of Wedding Crashers. "We're making a film together. Jennifer's a sweet girl but she's very vulnerable right now and has been through a really hard time. I know people would love it if we were dating, but we're not. She doesn't need to cry on my shoulders." Derailed -- in which she's called upon to be a guilty party, but still sympathetic -- is Aniston's next step in showing new shades as an actor. Meanwhile, her ability to carry a Hollywood comedy will be tested in another movie with an ironic title, Rumor Has It. Certainly one of the oddest premises in the fall/winter calendar, Rumor Has It revolves around the central conceit that the '60s classic The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman was based on actual events. And while 2004 (when the movie was shot) may have been a happier time in Aniston's home life, things were not so tranquil on Rumor Has It, a film that saw a cinematographer fired by a director, a director effectively fired by a lead male actor and a legendary director parachuted in to save the day. In Rumor Has It, Aniston plays Sarah Huttinger, a New York Times obituary writer who's stuck in a job with no prospect of advancement, and stuck in a relationship with a fianc� (Mark Ruffalo) she's not sure she wants to marry. Making matters worse is an upcoming reunion with her tennis-obsessed Pasadena family, led by her sharp-tongued grandmother (Shirley MacLaine). But an introduction to Internet millionaire Beau Burroughs (Kevin Costner) leads her into both a new relationship and the disturbing revelation that her own family may have been the template for The Graduate, with grandma as Mrs. Robinson and Beau as the lost-soul Dustin Hoffman character. 
Says Ruffalo: "The good thing about working with [people like
Aniston, Costner and MacLaine] is that this is the kind of movie they
really want to do. All this stuff that happened with Jennifer wasn't
going on when I was working with her, so my experience wasn't colored
by that. I found her to be a very gentle and graceful person, and
incredibly down-to-earth."For his part, Costner notes Rumor Has It is "not a sequel" to The Graduate. "It's an original comedy in its own right and a lot of fun." At least that's how it ended up. The movie began as the directorial debut of Ocean's Eleven scribe Ted Griffin (who also wrote the script for Rumor Has It). But within days of filming in July 2004, cinematographer Ed Lachman was fired. As well, Griffin is said to have feuded with Kevin Costner. Costner, a director himself, reportedly fought with Griffin about every directorial decision, and brought things to a him-or-me boil. Eight days after the start of production Griffin was fired and Rob Reiner (When Harry Met Sally, A Few Good Men) was brought in to pick up the pieces. And where was Jennifer Aniston during all this? Avoiding controversy as is her wont. Ironically, for someone who has been personally burned by the multi-billion-dollar industry that is celebrity gossip, Jennifer Aniston is a longtime celebrity-magazine addict, and admitted in the Vanity Fair interview that she'd broken down and bought one after going cold turkey for a while. "I feel like I've fallen off the wagon," she said. But neither the myriad tales of broken Hollywood marriages included therein, nor her own troubles, seem to have broken her of her romantic hopes. "In five years, I would hope to be married and have a kid," she said. "I still believe in marriage 100 per cent. When I hear people say that they would never do it again, it's like cutting off your nose to spite your face. "Why would you ever close your heart down?" - Jim Slotek |
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